Nostalgia Can Help Us Build a Better Future

October 29, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There is a widespread consensus that we’re on the cusp of a workplace revolution that will automate millions of jobs and replace millions of workers.

Among the many questions is whether these displaced workers will still be able to support themselves because technologies that are on the rise, like augmented and artificial intelligence, will spawn millions of new jobs and a new prosperity.

Those fearing that far more jobs will be eliminated than created have argued for fixes like a universal basic income that would place a minimum financial floor under every adult while ensuring that society doesn’t dissolve into chaos. How this safety net would be paid for and administered has always been far less clear in these proposals.

Others are arguing that the automation revolution will usher in a new era of flourishing, with some new jobs maintaining and safeguarding the new automated systems, and many others that we can’t even imagine yet. However, these new programming and maintainence jobs won’t be plentiful enough to replace the “manual” jobs that will be lost in our offices, factories and transportation systems. Other “replacement jobs” might also be scarce. In a post last January, I cited John Hagel’s argument that most new jobs will bunch towards the innovative, the most highly skilled, what he called “the scaling edge” of the job spectrum.

On the other hand, analysts who have considered the automation revolution at McKinsey Global Institute noted in a July, 2019 report that automation will also produce a burst of productivity and profitability within companies, that employees will be able to work more efficiently and reduce their time working (5-hour days or 4- day work weeks) while gaining more leisure time. With more routine tasks being automated, McKinsey estimates that the growing need to customize products and services for consumers with more time on their hands will create new companies and an avalanche of new jobs to serve them. At the same time, demands for more customization of existing products and services will create new jobs that require “people skills” in offices and on factory floors.

As we stand here today, it is difficult to know whether we should share Hagel’s concern or McKinsey’s optimism.

Predicting the likely impacts at the beginning of a workplace revolution is hardly an exact science. To the extent that history is a teacher, those with less education, fewer high-level skills and difficulties adapting to changing circumstances will be harmed the most. Far less certain are the impacts on the rest of us, whose education, skill levels and adaptability are greater but who may be less comfortable at the “scaling” edges of our industries.

Then there’s the brighter side. Will we be paid the same (or more) as we are today given the greater efficiency and productivity that automation will provide?  Will we work less but still have enough disposable income to support all of the new companies and workers who eager to serve our leisure time pursuits?  Maybe.

It is also possible to imagine scenarios where millions of people lose their livelihoods and government programs becomes “the last resort” to maintain living standards. Will vast new bureaucracies administer the social safety nets that will be required? Will the taxes on an increasingly productive business sector (with their slimmed down payrolls) be enough to support these programs? Will those who want to work have sufficient opportunities for re-training to fill the new jobs that are created?  And even more fundamentally, will we be able to accommodate the shift from free enterprise to something that looks a lot more like a welfare state?

While most of us have been dominated by the daily tremors and upheavals in politics, there are also daily tremors and upheavals that are changing how we work and even whether we’ll be able to work for “a livable wage” if we want to.

As I argued recently in The Next Crisis Will Be a Terrible Thing to Waste, the chance to realize your priorities improve significantly during times of disruption as long as you’re clear about your objectives and have done some tactical planning in advance. As you know, I also believe in the confidence that comes with hope OR that you can change things for the better if you believe enough in the future that you’re ready to act on its behalf.

Beyond finding and continuing to do “good work” in this new economy, I listed my key priorities in that post: policies that support thriving workers, families and communities and not just successful companies; jobs that assume greater environmental stewardship as essential to their productivity; and expanding the notion of what it means for a company “to be profitable” for all of its stakeholders.

From this morning’s perspective—and assuming that the future of work holds at least as much opportunity as misfortune—I’ve been not only thinking about those priorities but also about things I miss today that seemed to exist in the past. In other words, a period of rapid change like this is also a time for what Harvard’s Svetlana Boym once called “reflective nostalgia.” The question is how this singular mindset can fuel our passion for the objectives we want—motivate us to take more risks for the sake of change—in the turbulent days ahead.

Nostalgia isn’t about specific memories. Instead, it’s about a sense of loss, an emptiness today that you feel had once been filled in your life or work.

Unlike the kind of nostalgia that attempts to recreate a lost world from the ruins of the past, reflective nostalgia acknowledges your loss but also the impossibility of your ever recovering that former time. By establishing a healthy distance from an idealized past, reflective nostalgia liberates you to find new ways to gain something that you still need in the very different circumstances of the future that you want.

Because the urge to fill unsatisfied needs is a powerful motivator, I’ve been thinking about needs of mine that once were met, aren’t being met today, but could be satisfied again “if I always keep them in mind” while pursuing my priorities in the future. As you mull over my short list of “nostalgias” and think about yours, please feel free to drop me a line about losses you’d like to recoup in a world that’s on the cusp of reinvention.

MY SHORT LIST OF LOSSES:

– I miss a time when strangers (from marketers to the government) knew less about my susceptabilities and hot buttons. Today, given the on-line breadcrumbs I leave in my wake, strangers can track me, discover dimensions of my life that once were mine alone, and use that information to influence my decisions or just look over my shoulder. Re-building and protecting my private space is at the core of my ability to thrive.

I want to own my personal data, to sell it or not as I choose, instead of having it taken from me whenever I’m on-line or face a surveillance camera in a public space. I want a right to privacy that’s created by law, shielded from technology and protected by the authorities. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence at work and outside of it gives the creation of this right particular urgency as the world shifts and the boundaries around life and work are re-drawn.

– I miss a time when I didn’t think my organized world would fall apart if my technology failed, my battery went dead, the electricity was cut off or the internet was no longer available. I miss my self-reliance and resent my dependency on machines.

If I do have “more free time” in the future of work, I’ll push for more tech that I can fix when it breaks down and more resources that can help me to do so. I’ll advocate for more “fail-safe” back-up systems to reduce my vulnerability when my tech goes down. There is also the matter of my autonomy. I need to have greater understanding and control over the limits and possibilities of the tech tools that I use everyday because, to some degree, I am already a prisoner of my incompetence as one recent article puts it.

One possibility is that turning over [more] decisions and actions to an AI assistant creates a “nanny world” that makes us less and less able to act on our own. It’s what one writer has called the ‘Jeeves effect’ after the P.G. Wodehouse butler character who is so capable that Bertie Wooster, his employer, can get by being completely incompetent.

My real-life analogy is this. Even though I’ve had access to a calculator for most of my life, it’s still valuable for me to know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide without one. As tech moves farther beyond my ability to understand it or perform its critical functions manually, I need to maintain (or recover) more of that capability. Related to my first nostalgia, I’d meet this need by actively seeking “a healthier relationship” with my technology in my future jobs.

– I remember a time when I was not afraid that my lifestyle and consumption patterns were helping to degrade the world around me faster than the world’s ability to repair itself. At the same time, I know today that my absence of concern during much of my work life had more to do with my ignorance than the maintenance of a truly healthy balance between what nature was giving and humankind (including me) was taking.

As a result, I need greater confidence that my part in restoring that balance is a core requirement of any jobs that I’ll do in the future. With my sense of loss in mind, I can encourage more sustainable ways to work (and live) to evolve.

-Finally, I miss a time when a company’s success included caring for the welfare of workers, families and communities instead of merely its shareholders’ profits, a model that was not uncommon from the end of World War II through the 1970s. I miss a time, not so long ago, when workers bargained collectively and successfully for their rights and benefits on the job. I miss a time when good jobs with adequate pay and benefits along with safe working conditions were protected by carefully crafted trade protections instead of being easily eliminated as “too expensive” or “inefficient.”

While this post-War period can never be recovered, a leading group of corporate executives (The Business Roundtable) recently committed their companies to serving not only their shareholders but also their other “stakeholders,” including their employees and the communities where they’re located. As millions of jobs are lost to automation and new jobs are created in the disruption that follows, I’ll have multiple opportunities as a part of “this new economy workforce” to challenge companies I work for (and with) to embrace the broader standard of profitability that I miss.

+ + +

Instead of being mired in the past, reflective nostalgia provides the freedom to seek opportunities to fill real needs that have never gone away. With this motivating mindset, the future of work won’t just happen to me. It becomes a set of possibilities that I can actually shape.

This post was adapted from my October 27, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Perspective of Time Enables Good Work

June 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The future seemed closer in California than it does in Philadelphia where I’m writing this post. California also seemed to be having a more active conversation with its past, despite there being historical touchstones like the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall only a couple of miles from me. Californians seemed to have a deeper sense of where humans have been already and where we are headed in our lifetimes and beyond.

I’ve just gotten back from Los Angeles, so some of it may be my wandering state of mind. But the West Coast, and California in particular, was also the hoped-for destination of our landlocked frontier, where the promise of a transcontinental crossing would either be realized by generations of settlers or dashed. It’s where America faces the rising East, the part that turns its back on the confusion and stalemate of Washington and dares to propose solutions.

How much we let the distant past reverberate into an equally distant future—how much or how little we can escape our fixation with “the way that we feel right now”—this flow of time (or the lack of it) impacts the perspective we bring to everything we do, worry about, want to accomplish and leave behind for our kids to enjoy.

Despite its rep for seeking shallow gratifications in the here and now, at least some of California seemed to be looking back, almost to our beginnings, for clues on how the human race has gotten to this fragile and deeply compromised place. These time travelers seem to know that if we fail to understand our past and learn from it, we may never know that we’re repeating the same mistakes when we could be avoiding them.

They also see the future differently. At least some Californians seem to understand that by focusing almost exclusively on the present, we are neglecting problems whose consequences are likely to endure for decades if not centuries. On a timescale that includes our children, our children’s children, their children and beyond, they seem to be saying: we are responsible for addressing these problems because of the roles we have played in creating them. These adults seem to understand that in order to claim the future we want for ourselves and our descendants, we need to expand our perspective on time to include humanity’s full passage on earth, from the triumphs and tragedies that have brought us to today to the long-term future that’s worth working and sacrificing for.

And because it’s California after all, they’ve done this by creating richly entertaining destination experiences.

A saber-toothed tiger that can almost taste you

1. The La Brea Tar Pits

More than 10,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene Age, enormous mammals (so-called megafauna) coexisted for a time with some of the earliest humans. These were mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, dire wolves, sloths with foot-long claws, six-foot tall beavers “with incisors like medieval weapons,” and saber-tooth cats. Their enormous size was a response to the cold climate. A warm climate produces smaller bodies that expel heat while glacial intervals during the Pleistocene encouraged extra layers of bone, fat and fur with a smaller ratio of surface area to volume and a greater ability to hold in body heat. The scale of this engineering feat was enormous, with the largest mammoths weighing in at around ten tons, or three tons more than the largest African elephants today.

These megafauna lived in the cold, grassy plains that extended below the ice shelf in North America, from coast to coast. In certain places where oil pooled at ground level producing a kind of asphalt or tar, these mammals were drawn to the thin layers of water that accumulated just above the tar when they were thirsty and wanted to drink. As they sought out the water, individual animals became trapped in the tar. Other predators, drawn by their distress, also became trapped. Before long, these tar pits become the mass graveyards of the Pleistocene age.

The La Brea Tar Pits are located along Wilshire Boulevard in the center of LA. Preserved in them, researchers have discovered one of the largest repositories of Pleistocene megafauna in the world. They have also found important clues about how these massive animals disappeared altogether and the Holocene—or our next geological age—began.

For years, the speculation was that rapid climate change or disease led to extinction of the megafauna, and both likely contributed to it. But bands of humans shared these grassy plains with these giant mammals. Our ancestors had a competitive sense of conquest and adventure, and they needed to feed their growing families.

In his Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs describes the struggle of man versus megafauna in an arresting but ambivalent way:

This is a love story—boy meets girl, if you will. One partner is a [largely] unpeopled hemisphere, the other is our hungry, inquisitive species. Some might tell you that the encounter wasn’t love at all, but domination, overkill, an invasive species hell-bent on spreading into a land that was doing just fine as it was, without us. Some scientists have called it blitzkrieg, mammoths felled like cordwood. Ours was no docile species, and the animals were not ready for us, or our weaponry. Archeologists from Alaska to Florida have found Paleolithic spearpoints and stone blades still holding protein signatures from the meat of horse, camel, sloth, bison, bear and the proboscideans, mammoths and mastodons. Ice Age bones in the Americas have been found scribed with human butchering marks, blackened from fires. But humans didn’t always win. Many died, some were eaten. First people, wildly outnumbered by animals, would have found themselves tossed and trampled by tusks and hooves or torn to pieces by the scissoring teeth of scimitar cats. No matter how well armed they were, even with Eurasian wolf dogs at their sides, surviving among Rancholabrean megaflora would have been challenging. Nobody said love would be easy.

These encounters were difficult, but in the end the human hunters with their always improving weapons were smarter, more tenacious and more powerful. The scientists and researchers at the La Brea Tar Pits and elsewhere have concluded that it was neither climate nor disease that led to the mass extinction of the megafauna. Whether love story (human drive and ingenuity) or tragedy (a human “blitzkrieg”), mankind triumphed over nature by wiping these enormous animals from the face of the earth.

Parallels between the annihilation of mammoths and mastodons and of entire species today due to over-hunting, over-fishing, pollution, and loss of habitat are hardly exact. Similarly, there will always be uncertainties about what happened 10,000 years ago. But the human drives (for better and worse) that contributed to these extinctions are the same. Nature is no match for man’s desire and ability to take whatever he can from it, as quickly and efficiently as he can.

During the Pleistocene, humans killed off the megafauna. During our Holocene, the same motivations nearly exterminated the American bison (from a herd of 60 million in 1800 to only a few hundred 90 years later).

Today, mankind is likely in a new geoglogical era called the Anthropocene. For the very first time in our checkered history, human activity is exerting the dominant influence on both climate and the environment.

Can we learn lessons from the past about how to constrain our best and worst impulses so that we neither “love” nor “dominate” our earthly home to death?

Are we able to look back—sometimes very far back—to learn as much as we can about ourselves and our impacts when once again we are pushing the world around us to the brink?

Can our minds hold a broad enough perspective of time for that?

The biomorphic Pacific Visions building at the Aquarium of the Pacific

2. Pacific Visions

Two weeks ago, the new Pacific Visions building opened as part of the existing aquarium complex in Long Beach, just outside LA. While its biomorphic curves “shimmer like the ocean” on the outside, it’s the future of the Earth’s oceans, its life forms and our human interactions with them that are the focus of its programming.

Visitors are engaged by several of our oceans’ current challenges and opportunities in the Pacific Visions theater with its surround screen and multisensory effects that include wind, fog, strobe lights, seat rumblers and blasts of ocean-related scents. There is high resolution footage of sea creatures, animations, computer graphics as well as images of what cities and other ocean-facing human landscapes look like today and might look like tomorrow. In other words, visitors can quite literally “sense” our current predicament and some of the ways that we have begun to confront it. The theater is both immersive and enabling, inspiring viewers “to think creatively about out global future” while beginning to see themselves as the oceans’ “stewards.”

The theater empties into the Culmination Gallery which lets visitors try their hands at ocean stewardship by making the ethical choices and trade-offs that will be required to restore specific California ecosystems many of them are familiar with already. For groups, there are interactive game tables themed around food, energy and water that invite as many as ten players to make a sequence of choices while working together to create enough of each resource to sustain California’s residents into the future.

There are animal exhibits, including one profiling yellowtail a fish native to California’s coastal waters. It demonstrates how the fish could be raised in offshore farms to produce as much protein as beef or pork but with far less harmful environmental impacts. Another project that promises a healthier future involves Pacific and Olympia oysters. Visitors learn how oyster farming can stabilize erosion-prone shorelines while filtering and cleaning the waters that are closest to population areas.

“Future City Fly-Through” uses touch screen controls on wall screens to “fly” visitors through a virtual city while they explore innovations reducing water usage in a drought-prone locales like California and using ocean water in unfamiliar ways. Opportunities for exploration include vertical farming methods and the utilization of desalination plants.

Admittedly, several of the experiences offered at Pacific Visions are also available in online simulations, but our hosts seemed to know that most players will choose a game like Fortnite instead of having an educational experience during their personal screentime. So Pacific Visions offers a destination-based alternative, employing technology to provide an immersive experience that enables visitors to do the serious work of designing their futures in inherently playful ways.

Unless there are more “active environmentalists” among Americans than there are today, confronting the challenge of climate change will be nearly impossible.

With its $53 million cost and 29,000 square foot destination, Pacific Visions is aiming for every recruit it can enlist among school children, vacationers, day trippers, and those who already support sustainability with their hearts but not so much with their actions.

In a recent post, I argued for the strategy of relying upon respected leaders whose own minds have been changed about the significance of climate change in the light of their Republican or Libertarian values to reach out to skeptics in their own communities with the same arguments that persuaded them. Common values will give those arguments a hearing while the entreaties of “tree huggers” with different priorities continue to fall on deaf ears. Californians are being similarly strategic with their investment dollars and objectives at Pacific Visions. They are seeking recruits to help design a healthier future for our oceans by packaging their serious purpose along with the fun of a day spent at Disneyland.

3. More Hurdles Ahead

California in general and LA in particular seemed poised between the distant past and the un-designed future that extends for generations in front of us. Getting out of the present and deepening our perspective of time clarifies what is truly important while gaining the wisdom from our mistakes, even when they happened in the last geological age or will only be felt by our great, great grandchildren.

The practical work of designing the future causes us to confront what we don’t know, what others around us are failing to appreciate, and how to deepen the understanding that stewardship requires. In researching this post, I came upon a short list compiled by the FrameWorks Institute called “Gaps in Understanding” between what the experts know about the current threats to our oceans and what the general public knows. As Pacific Visions evolves its educational programming and other forward-thinking institutions follow its lead, here are some of the gaps in public understanding that need to be bridged if we are to find a more sustainable future for our water world:

–         most people see the oceans as vast, undifferentiated bodies of water instead of supporting vastly different ecosystems with different temperatures, currents and habitats;

–         the public doesn’t understand how global warming is disrupting currents and temperatures in both the atmosphere and the oceans and how these disruptions are contributing to the extreme weather many of them have been experiencing;

–         people believe that most ocean pollution consists of plastic waste. By failing to understand the extent of pollution caused by our much larger systems of manufacturing, consumption, transportation and energy usage, they are unable to explore the kinds of solutions that are needed to stop the continuing pollution of our oceans;

–         because the public believes that the oceans’ vast capacity effectively reduces the negative consequences of human activity, it fails to grasp either the complexity or severity of the challenges to the oceans’ diverse biosystems;

–         members of the public have some understanding of the risks to particular ocean animals (like sea turtles) but fail to appreciate how overfishing, acidification and rising water temperatures are threatening the extinction of entire species;

–         people lack a clear understanding of the role that national governments can and should play, either acting on their own or in concert with other national governments. This results in “a largely empty assignment of responsibility” for addressing the oceans’ declining prospects.

–         when the public thinks about “what can be done,” it focuses on modifying individual behavior (like more recycling) instead of implementing systematic solutions like expanding and enforcing marine protected areas, reforming the commercial fishing industry, regulating and enforcing pollution controls, enforcing carbon emission limits, and incorporating “ocean protection” into school curricula and government policymaking.

To design a sustainable future, we need to close the gaps between what the experts and the rest of us seem to know.

These gaps in basic knowledge speak to the extent of the educational and motivational hurdles that are ahead of us as we confront the onset of climate change on land as well as sea.

Escaping the gratifications and distractions of the present and gaining the perspective of time–its long-term lessons as well as its long-term consequences and possibilities—provides some of the incentive to fill in these gaps in our knowledge.

It’s the yeoman’s task that the educators and entertainers at the La Brea Tar Pits and Pacific Visions are already taking on.

This post was adapted from my June 9, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Blockchain Goes to Work

May 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week I’ve re-worked a post from last August in the first of a two-part consideration on the future of work. Today, it’s envisioning a workforce where more of us will be working for ourselves, selling increments of our time and talent in what amounts to a series of paying jobs. While it’s a response to the loss of “traditional jobs” to automation, it also holds the promise of greater autonomy, abundance and prosperity if we choose to value the right things by standing up for and safeguarding our human priorities along the way.

The future of work is being designed today. Perhaps the most exciting part is that each one of us has a role to play–is part of a broader negotiation–about how that future should unfold.

1 An Optimistic Vision

The future of work has never looked more abundant, although many don’t see it that way.

Some are busy projecting job losses from automation and brain-replacing artificial intelligence, telling us we’ll all be idled and that much poorer for it. Or they’re identifying the brainpower careers that will remain so we can point ourselves or our tuition payments in their direction. For these forecasters, the future of work is at best the pursuit of diminishing returns.

Some of the most pessimistic (or politically ambitious) among them have been formulating universal income plans to replace today’s more limited safety nets. They tell us that a stipend like this will liberate us to pursue our passions since new government checks will cover our basic necessities. This seems misguided to me. As George Orwell noted, some utopians simply cannot “imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain.”

An alternate vision focuses on innovations that could enable us to do more and better work while unlocking greater prosperity.

One of the enabling technologies that is already ushering in this future is blockchain. Like the protocols for transmitting data across digital networks led to the Internet, blockchain-based software applications could fundamentally change the ways that we work.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most commonly with no central monitor or regulator. The technology enables every block in the chain to record data that can be seen and reviewed by every other block, maintaining its accuracy through its security protections and transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in a digital ledger or transaction log. The need for and costs of a “middleman” (like a bank) and other impediments (like legal and financial gatekeepers) are avoided. Unlike traditional recordkeeping, there is no central database for meddlers to corrupt.

Blockchain technology supports the sale and use of digital currencies (like bitcoin) and just as importantly, “smart contracts” that enforce the rules about how value is exchanged by parties when they reach agreement. Ethereum utilizes its blockchain platform to host most of the projects that attract, manage and pay for time and talent in decentralized ways today. Tantalizing glimpses into this future are also available at the social network Steemit and on the payment platform Bitwage.

Steemit’s uses a digital currency called Steem that you can redeem for cash for your contributions to the social network’s “hivemind.” For example, users are paid for posts, for the number of people liking their posts, for how quickly you spot another post that becomes popular, that is, for the value of your contributions to the network. Users are funding jobs like travel blogging while they crisscross the world and, reportedly, one early adopter has already earned more than a million dollars worth of Steem. In more traditional buying-and-selling transactions, Bitwage’s payment application allows employees or freelancers to receive their wages in bitcoin without requiring either their employers or clients to use a digital currency exchange.

For work-based ecosystems built on blockchains to evolve further, they will need to become faster and more scalable without sacrificing the security and decentralization that are their hallmarks. In this pursuit, Ethereum and a raft of competitors are experimenting with a protocol called Lightening that can settle millions of digital currency transactions more quickly and cheaply but that needs “to go off the blockchain” in order to do so. These companies are also exploring structural changes to basic blockchain technology. The prize that drives them is an online platform that is durable enough to support a global marketplace where every kind of work can be bought and sold.

Let’s call it a work2benefit exchange.

Because your time and talent has value and is in limited supply, you could sell it in a market that’s vibrant enough to buy it. A blockchain-based exchange might easily handle transactions that involve very small as well as larger, project-oriented jobs. Because you have capabilities that you’ve sold before and others that you’ve given away because there was no way to be compensated, an exchange like this could help secure prior income streams while providing you with new ones. Such a marketplace would easily dwarf Walmart’s in size without the downsides of a company middleman taking his profits, making you keep his work schedule, commute to his place of business or contribute to his overhead.

Previously unrealized income streams—even small ones—will be particularly welcome.

Suppose you’re asked to provide 5 minutes of feedback on your recent doctor’s visit. Your scarce resources are the time and judgment that you might not provide if you weren’t being paid for them. Their one-time value might be modest, but as the demands for your input keep coming, payments for it will add up. A blockchain exchange could pay you for editing a resume in 20 minutes or designing a company’s logo in 2 hours; providing traffic-cam information on heavily traveled routes you are already taking; matchmaking acquaintances with service providers that have something they need; selling your personal data to marketers who want you to buy their products; maybe even a government incentive for completing your tax returns or voting in the next election. Similarly, when I need the benefit of someone else’s work, this marketplace could connect me to it, even if the time and talent is half a world away.

Work2benefit exchanges that can handle incremental transactions like these haven’t been built yet, let alone populated by enough buyers and sellers to make them viable—but they’re coming. You’ll still need your judgment, vision and hustle, but before long it will be possible to make a living in a marketplace where you (and maybe billions of others) will each be blocks in a global blockchain. Many people will continue to work in groups. Offices and factories won’t vanish. But traditional jobs that once came with pensions, health benefits and provable credit will become increasingly scarce. The stripped-down, “independent contractor” work that’s left will almost certainly be supplemented by new ways of getting paid for your human resources.

Blockchain and related technologies will unlock new categories of personal wealth and autonomy. They could fill the future of work with greater abundance for us to share with one another. Tomorrow’s challenge won’t be finding enough work to make a living but reimagining and re-bundling job securities like health care and creditworthiness around all the new jobs we’ll be doing. Next week, I’ll introduce you to some of the people and companies that are helping to build these protections around our increasingly autonomous workforce.

2. The Future Begins With a Vision

A vision should linger and inspire for long enough that it fixes in the minds eye where it becomes part of the imagination, a cause for hope, and fuel that’s needed to overcome the obstacles that will always stand in its way. Here, in brief, are some of the challenges that a bold-enough vision will need to see us through, starting with the inevitable turf wars and technology challenges:

-There is resistance from the mainstream banking community to digital currencies and the exchanges that convert them into cash for gig economy paychecks. For example, a story in today’s Wall Street Journal chronicles the banking controversy that has already embroiled one digital currency exchange. Some of the current banking industry will need to be disrupted so that new “fin-tech” mechanisms can take their place.

-There are technology challenges to making digital platforms large enough to handle the smart contracts that will bring all these new buyers and sellers of work together. The ecosystem of applications will need to be robust enough to attract, manage and compensate the sale of goods and talent in a global marketplace. To meet these challenges, new applications are being developed outside of blockchain’s architecture (with its attendant security risks and middleman costs) while some of the fundamentals behind blockchain technology itself are being reconsidered. If you’re interested in a deeper dive, more about blockchain’s “scalability” hurdles can be found here.

-Managing yourself to a stable, reliable income from many jobs in a way that meets your needs and your family’s needs requires its own expertise. The freedom to decide when to work and how often to work is liberating, but as the recent strikes by Uber drivers illustrate, it isn’t easy to cobble a patchwork of compensated time “into a living” while also selling your services at “a market price.” We’ll all have to learn more about how to put our livelihoods together while finding new ways to bargain effectively for what we need from each one of our work-based exchanges.

-Not everyone is naturally suited to be an entrepreneur, so we’ll have to learn how to embrace additional parts of our entrepreneurial spirit too. Working for yourself involves not only doing your paying jobs but also functioning as your back and front offices by doing your own marketing, accounting, taxes, establishing and monitoring your co-working relationships, maintaining your skill levels, and determining the prices for your goods and services. Most 9-5 jobs didn’t require you to do all these things, but as jobs like this disappear, you’ll be doing more of them yourself—with both the upsides and downsides that new opportunities for growth and mastery can bring.

Thinking through the hurdles hopefully reminds us of the promises. We’ll thrive with greater freedom, convenience and efficiency by working where, when and how we want to. We’ll be paid for increments of our time that we used to give away for free. We’ll increasingly stand both behind our work and out in front of it in ways that will make “what we do” an even more powerful demonstration of who we are and what is important to us.

This future of work is being written today.

We’re building it with our ideas and conversations as new ecosystems gradually evolve around it.

What comes next will be exciting and daunting, both creative and destructive, as the familiar is replaced by something that few of us have experienced before.

This future can have a human face, an opportunity for workers, families and communities to flourish, as long as we don’t leave the ideas and conversations about how that can happen to someone else.

This post was adapted from my May 19, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken

April 23, 2019 By David Griesing 1 Comment

A growing part of the American economy—the part that’s harvesting and utilizing our personal data to drive what we consume—no longer depends on “the basic reciprocities” that once supported our social contract. In other segments of our economy, business is also profiting at worker’s expense and democratic capitalism’s promises to us about shared prosperity are regularly broken.

The mutual benefits of a capitalist economy were supposed to include our thriving as workers, being fairly compensated for our work and able to support our families and communities, while our employers also thrived when we used our paychecks to buy their goods and services. That virtuous circle has been the bedrock of capitalism’s social contract since Adam Smith first described it 300 years ago.

Today, its bonds are weakened, if not altogether broken.

A leading edge of the breakdown is tech platforms harvesting our personal data “for free” while selling it to others who use it to drive our decisions about what we consume. In what’s been called “surveillance capitalism,” we’re no longer valued at the front end of the exchange for what we provide (in this instance, our information). Instead our only value is at the back-end, determined by how much the companies that utilize our data can manipulate us into buying whatever they’re selling.

In this growing segment of our economy, largely exploitative exchanges have already replaced mutually beneficial ones. In addition to not paying us for our information, this economic model creates very few jobs in a departure from the consumer-oriented companies of the past. Its failure to value what we’re providing as workers and consumers relative to the enormous profits its trophy companies are reaping undermines both the health of the economy and the democratic institutions that depend on it.

In our economy’s more traditional jobs, we are also losing out today when it comes to the fair exchange of our work for its supposed benefits. A broader stagnation in the American economy results when the benefits that companies gain from pro-business policies fail to “trickle down” and benefit the vast majority of workers who lack the financial security to also be shareholders in these same companies. The result is a yawning wealth gap between the 1% (or, perhaps more accurately, the top 10%) and every other American.

Communities break down both economically and politically when we’re not compensated adequately for the work and information that we provide. What were supposed to be “a series of mutual benefit equations” between workers and employers, consumers and companies that sell us things, have become increasingly unbalanced.

The first discussion today looks at this breakdown in the social contract. The second part argues for a shift in priorities that can confront the perils of surveillance capitalism along with other distortions—like income inequality and stagnant growth—that harm all but a small percentage of those who participate in America’s economy today.

Instead of more failed attempts to increase economic opportunity through pro-business polices or to limit the harms of this approach with band aids for those it leaves behind, a far better alternative is promoting work for all who are willing to do it, while making the dignity of work (and the thriving families and communities that good work produces) our priorities. Rebalancing the economic equation for workers and consumers will enable the economy to benefit nearly everyone again while mending vital parts of America’s promise.

I took the pictures here in Germantown, a nearby “town” in Philadelphia where the Revolutionary War battle took place. Three centuries ago, America’s democratic capitalism began in places like Germantown. In the fabric of its old and repurposed buildings, it’s not difficult to find a metaphor when you’re looking for one.

In the side of one old factory, there is a bricked-in wall where there used to be a workroom. In the future of our work, I’d argue that bricked-over workrooms like this, where we used to benefit from our contributions as workers and consumers, need to be opened up and revitalized. We need to call out our increasingly feudal system for what it is, and reorient our priorities to restore basic economic relationships that are foundation stones for our way of life.

The Fundamental Breakdown

In a post from January, I discussed the arguments that Oren Cass makes in his new book The Once and Future Worker about how the mutually beneficial relationships between workers, consumers and businesses have broken down since the 1970s and our repeated failures to address the imbalance. As I said at the time:

[Cass] is concerned about the vast majority of urban, suburban and rural workers who are not sharing in America’s prosperity because of policy choices that have been made over the past 50 years by “the Left” (for more government spending on safety nets) and “the Right” (for its insistence on driving [business profits] over every other priority). Putting expensive band-aids on the victims of pro-growth government policies—when we could simply be making better choices—is hardly a sustainable way forward in Cass’s view.

Cass argues that propping up business to create a bigger pie for all has been a failure because those bigger slices are being eaten almost exclusively by business owners and their investors as opposed to their workers, their communities, or the economy at large. To counter this result, Cass wants policy makers to adopt entirely different priorities than the Right and Left have been embracing, namely, active, sustained promotion of “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities [as] the central determinant of long term prosperity.” Several of his proposals about how to do so, along with his views about the dignity of work and its importance to democracy, are set out in that earlier post.

Cass’s conclusion (and mine) is that America needs to change its economic priorities before the costs of failure get any worse.

In another new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff focuses on a leading edge of the current problem: the stark imbalance in “behavioral futures markets” where data about what we “are likely to want next” has tremendous value to companies selling us products and services but which no one has been paying us to provide. For Zuboff, these tech platforms, along with the marketers and sellers who buy our behavioral information, have created “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material” while implementing “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification.” If the industry players can seduce you into giving enough information about your motivations and desires to your smart phones, smart speakers, social networks and search engines, they can persuade you to buy (or do) almost anything.

Zuboff discusses how economic theorists from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek legitimized capitalism as a system where workers needed to be paid well enough to provide for their families, be productive members of their communities, and have enough spending money left over to buy the products and services that companies like their employers were providing. In an essay that laid out her argument before Surveillance Capitalism was published, Zuboff cites economic historian Karl Polanyi for his views about how American companies after World War II were expected to offer a kind of communal reciprocity that involved hiring the available workers, hiking wages when possible, and sharing their prosperity rather than hoarding it.

Polanyi knew that capitalism was never self-regulating, could be profoundly destructive, and that its foreseeable human tolls needed to be minimized. To do so, “measures and policies” also had to be integrated “into powerful institutions [that were] designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land and money.” Zuboff cites Polanyi’s post-War study of General Motors not only for for the ways that fair labor practices, unionization and collective bargaining preserved “the organic reciprocities” between its workers and owners but also for how much the public appreciated these shared benefits at the time.

In the 1950s, for example, 80 percent of [American] adults said that ‘big business’ was a good thing for the country, 66 percent believed that business required little or no change, and 60 percent agreed, ‘the profits of large companies help make things better for everyone who buys their products or services.’

It was a balance that persisted for almost 40 years until what Zuboff calls “the ascendancy of neoliberalism” promoted an extreme form of capitalism where owner profits and share price were paramount and a responsible commitment to workers and communities no longer held capitalism’s worst tendencies in check. Around 1980, Oren Cass notes a related shift. Instead of creating worker satisfaction through “the dignity of work,” there was an economic policy shift from promoting worker satisfaction through the quality of their jobs to keeping them happy as consumers by giving them more stuff to buy with their paychecks.

Zuboff argues that the surveillance capitalists stepped in once these established reciprocities were breached, with profound effects for individual Americans as workers and consumers, for communities whose vitality depends on them, and for our democratic way of life itself.

Instead of paying for the parts of us that they’re profiting from, the surveillance capitalists pay us nothing for our behavioral data. Given the enormous size and profitability of companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, they also “give back” far fewer jobs to the employment market than a GM once did. Moreover, these companies feel that they owe us nothing in exchange for manipulating us into buying whatever they’re selling—what Zuboff calls a kind of “radical indifference.” Without so much as an afterthought, they take without giving much back to us individually, to the job market, or to the community at large. Capitalism’s ability to lift all boats was supposed to be a driving force for democracy and the genius of the American Dream.

The absence of organic reciprocities with people as sources of either consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy. In fact, the origins of democracy in both Britain and America have been traced to these very reciprocities. [the citations I’ve omitted here are provided in her essay]

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff describes the problem but doesn’t propose solutions. Cass, on the other hand, argues that capitalism remains the best hope for workers to reclaim their share of economic prosperity, but that we’ll have to change our public policies in order to restore the necessary reciprocities. As for surveillance capitalism, tech futurist Jaron Lanier made an early argument for countering tech company indifference and reclaiming the benefit of our personal data in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future? His proposals are even more feasible today.

The bricked-off memory of this old workroom seems more hopeful in the springtime.

Restoring the Balance

Cass’s Once and Future Worker is an important book because he backs up his ideological preferences with hard data. His solutions begin with the need for new government policies that aim to support thriving workers, families and communities by reinforcing the democratic give-and-take that is barely holding America together today. Along the way, Cass never loses sight of the real human impacts—for better and for worse—of economic forces and the policies that attempt to manage them.

For example, in his chapter “A Future for Work,” Cass argues that the workforce disruptions that will result from automation are a natural and positive effect of every innovation from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Learning how to do more with less is essential for economic growth. At the same time however, he argues strenuously that gains in economic productivity from new inventions and technologies (fewer workers producing the same amount) need to be matched by policy-driven gains in overall economic output (which will give displaced workers the ability to find new jobs as more wealth is created, living standards improve and consumer demand grows).

This is precisely what happened from 1947 to 1972, widely seen as the golden age of American manufacturing and the nation’s middle class. Economy-wide productivity increased by 99 percent; only fifty workers were needed by the end of the Vietnam War to do the work that one hundred could complete at the end of World War II. The result was not mass unemployment. Instead, America produced more stuff. The same share of the population was working in 1972 as in 1947, and men’s median income was 86 percent higher…[W]ith fewer workers required to produce the output of 1947, many could serve markets in 1972 that hadn’t existed a generation earlier or that had been much smaller.

Cass admits that these disruptions are hard for individual workers to weather but that expanding economic output always provides new jobs for displaced workers eventually. I’ve discussed the theory that at least some workers can prepare for disruptions like automation by developing skills “at the scalable edges” of their industries before their jobs disappear. But Cass also cites the introduction of ATM machines and fears about bank closures for an easier transition given the health of the economy at the time. In the years when ATM machines debuted, economic output (or an expanding economy) was matching productivity gains (and business profits). Since these ATMs lowered the banks’ cost of doing business, they repeatedly responded by opening more branches and creating new jobs.

Unfortunately, government statistics indicate that current productivity gains are not being matched by gains in overall economic output. It is a time when companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are using their innovations to maximize corporate profits but provide relatively few jobs while exploiting free user data–giving back little (beyond convenience) that can enable workers, families and communities to thrive as well. So if you don’t feel like you’re “getting ahead” today, it’s not your imagination; the output economy that creates new economic opportunities and new jobs isn’t keeping up, and it hasn’t been doing so for years. Writes Cass:

From 1950 to 2000, while productivity in the manufacturing sector rose by 3.1 percent annually, value-added output grew by 3.6 percent—and employment increased, from 14 million to 17 million. During 2000-2016, productivity rose by a similar 3.3 percent annually. But output growth was only 1.1 percent—and employment fell, from 17 million to 12 million. Even with all of the technological advancement of the twenty-first century, had manufacturers continued to grow their businesses at the same rate as in the prior century, they would have needed more workers—a total of 18 million, by 2016 [if output had also been growing].

While he does not describe the problem in terms of “reciprocities” between workers, businesses and consumers like Zuboff, Cass would agree that the imbalances between them are at the heart of the problem and need to be corrected. Once again, several of the policy solutions he proposes are reviewed in my January post. All reject the failed economic policies of the Left and the Right in favor of new approaches that will help workers, families and communities to thrive even if we have to settle for making somewhat less money as an economy overall.

Long before Shoshana Zuboff was railing about “surveillance capitalism,” Jaron Lanier was arguing that our behavioral information has tremendous value to the tech platforms, marketers and sellers or what he calls the “Siren Servers” that are harvesting it, and that we should be putting a price tag on our personal data before they take any more of it for free.

Like both Zuboff and Cass, Lanier believes in an economy that is sustained by a thriving middle class with plenty of hard, fulfilling work. His quandary is finding a way that more livelihoods can be sustained “in a world in which information is king,” as his Guardian book reviewer put it.

To that end, Lanier fears that in the early days of the internet we spent too much time worrying about open access and too little, if any time worrying about the digital economy’s likely impacts on job security and the monetizing of user information. Lanier emphasizes the highly personal nature of this exploitation by arguing that our behavioral data “is people in disguise” and morally intertwined with the humans who supplied it.

Lanier’s corrective is to implement a system where we would each be given “nanopayments” for the use of our biometric property. In 2013, he envisioned more sophisticated archives to record where our data originates as well as what it should be worth. He takes over half of his book to describe this mechanism. For our purposes, what he envisioned five years ago can be reduced (although far too easily) to a series of blockchain-based payments for our provision of useful personal data, similar to the system discussed here in a post from last August. Lanier’s nanopayments to individuals whenever a company profits from their personal information would be daunting to implement but it would also go a long way towards restoring Zuboff’s “organic reciprocities” and bringing Cass’s broader economic growth into the business of surveillance capitalism.

+ + +

The mutual benefits that we once enjoyed as workers, consumers and business owners in exchange for what we were providing is no longer a reality. The reasons for that loss and the blame for those responsible are just the front-end of our thinking about what we’re prepared to do about it.

In the election cycles ahead of us, it is hard to believe that our nation will have the kind of reasoned debate that we need to be having about the future of our work and its impact on our families, our local communities and our way of life itself. But maybe, hopefully, a conversation along the lines I am arguing for above will begin alongside the shouting matches we are already having about the need to abandon democratic capitalism altogether.

Cass, Zuboff and Lanier all begin with the proposition—and it’s where I start too—that our future needs to be built by human workers and that the work we’ll be doing needs to enable us, our loved ones, our neighbors, our shared economy, and not merely a protected few, to flourish.

We have managed to do this before.

Many of us have experienced its mutual benefit in our lifetimes, and we can experience it again.

But first, we’ll need to restore the social contract around our work.

This post was adapted from my April 21, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe on this page, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities

March 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It is human priorities that should be driving Smart City initiatives, like the ones in Toronto profiled here last week.

Last week’s post also focused on a pioneering spirit in Toronto that many American cities and towns seem to have lost. While we entrench in the moral righteousness of our sides in the debate—including, for many, a distrust of collective governance, regulation and taxation—we drift towards an uncertain future instead of claiming one that can be built on values we actually share.

In its King Street and Quayside initiatives, Toronto is actively experimenting with the future it wants based on its residents’ commitment to sustaining their natural environment in the face of urban life’s often toxic impacts. They’re conducting these experiments in a relatively civil, collaborative and productive way—an urban role model for places that seem to have forgotten how to work together. Toronto’s bold experiments are also utilizing “smart” technologies in their on-going attempts to “optimize” living and working in new, experimental communities.

During a short trip this week, I got to see the leading edges of New York City’s new Hudson Yards community (spread over 28 acres with an estimated $25 billion price tag) and couldn’t help being struck by how much it catered to those seeking more luxury living, shopping and workspaces than Manhattan already affords. In other words, how much it could have been a bold experiment about new ways that all of its citizens might live and work in America’s first city for the next half-century, but how little it actually was. A hundred years ago, one of the largest immigrant migrations in history made New York City the envy of the world. With half of its current citizens being foreign-born, perhaps the next century, unfurling today, belongs to newer cities like Toronto.

Still, even with its laudable ambition, it will not be easy for Toronto and other future-facing communities to get their Smart City initiatives right, as several of you were also quick to remind me last week. Here is a complaint from a King Street merchant that one of you (thanks Josh!) found and forwarded that seems to cast what is happening in Toronto in a less favorable light than I had focused upon it:

What a wonderful story. But as with [all of] these wonderful plans some seem to be forgotten. As it appears are the actual merchants. Google certainly a big winner here. Below an excerpt written by one of the merchants:

‘The City of Toronto has chosen the worst time, in the worst way, in the worst season to implement the pilot project. Their goal is clearly to move people through King St., not to King St. For years King St. was a destination, now it is a thoroughfare.

‘The goal of the King St. Pilot project was said to be to balance three important principles: to move people more effectively on transit, to support business and economic prosperity and to improve public space. In its current form, the competing principles seem to be decidedly tilted away from the economic well-being of merchants and biases efficiency over convenience. The casual stickiness of pedestrians walking and stopping at stores, restaurants and other merchants is lost.

‘Additionally, the [transit authority] TTC has eliminated a number of stops along King St., forcing passengers to walk further to enter and disembark streetcars, further reducing pedestrian traffic and affecting areas businesses. The TTC appears to believe that if they didn’t have to pick up and drop off people, they could run their system more effectively.

‘The dubious benefits of faster street car traffic on King St. notwithstanding, the collateral damage of the increased traffic of the more than 20,000 cars the TTC alleges are displaced from King St to adjoining streets has turned Adelaide, Queen, Wellington and Front Sts. into a gridlock standstill. Anyone who has tried to navigate the area can attest that much of the time, no matter how close you are you can’t get there from here.

‘Along with the other merchants of King St. and the Toronto Entertainment District we ask that Mayor Tory and Toronto council to consider a simple, reasonable and cost-effective alternative. Put lights on King St. that restrict vehicle traffic during rush hours, but return King St. to its former vibrant self after 7 p.m., on weekends and statutory holidays. It’s smart, fair, reasonable and helps meet the goals of the King St. pilot project.

Two things about this complaint seemed noteworthy. The first is how civil and constructive this criticism is in a process that hopes to “iterate” as real time impacts are assessed. It’s a tribute that Toronto’s experiments not only invite but are also receiving feedback like this. Alas, the second take-away from Josh’s comment is far more nettlesome. “[However many losers there may be along the way:] Google certainly a big winner here.”

The tech giant’s partnership with Canada’s governments in Toronto raises a constellation of challenging issues, but it’s useful to recall that pioneers who dare to claim new frontiers always do so with the best technology that’s available. While the settling of the American West involved significant collateral damage (to Native Americans and Chinese migrants, to the buffalo and the land itself), it would not have been possible without existing innovations and new ones that these pioneers fashioned along the way. Think of the railroads, the telegraph poles, even something as low-tech as the barbed wire that was used to contain livestock.

The problem isn’t human and corporate greed or heartless technology—we know about them already—but failing to recognize and reduce their harmful impacts before it is too late. The objective for pioneers on new frontiers should always be maximizing the benefits while minimizing the harms that can be foreseen from the very beginning instead of looking back with anger after the damage is done.

We have that opportunity with Smart City initiatives today.

Because they concentrate many of the choices that will have to be made when we boldly dare to claim the future of America again, I’ve been looking for a roadmap through the moral thicket in the books and articles that are being written about these initiatives today. Here are some of the markers that I’ve discovered.

Human priorities, realized with the help of technology

1. Markers on the Road to Smarter and More Vibrant Communities

The following insights come almost entirely from a short article by Robert Kitchin, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland. In my review of the on-going conversation about Smart Cities, I found him to be one of its most helpful observers.

In his article, Kitchin discusses the three principal ways that smart cities are understood, the key promises smart initiatives make to stakeholders, and the perils to be avoided around these promises.

Perhaps not surprisingly, people envision cities and other communities “getting smarter” in different ways. One constituency sees an opportunity to improve both “urban regulation and governance through instrumentation and data-driven systems”–essentially, a management tool. A bolder and more transformative vision sees information and communication technology “re-configur[ing] human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, and management,” thereby “produc[ing] smarter citizens, workers and public servants” who “can enact polic[ies], produce better products… foster indigenous entrepreneurship and attract inward investment.” The first makes the frontier operate more efficiently while the second improves nearly every corner of it.

The third Smart City vision is “a counter-weight or alternative” to each of them. It wants these technologies “to promote a citizen-centric model of development that fosters social innovation and social justice, civic engagement and hactivism, and transparent and accountable governance.” In this model, technology serves social objectives like greater equality and fairness. Kitchin reminds us that these three visions are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the priorities embedded in a community’s vision of a “smarter” future could include elements of each of them, functioning like checks and balances, in tension with one another.

Smart City initiatives promise to solve pressing urban problems, including poor economic performance; government dysfunction; constrained mobility; environmental degradation; a declining quality of life, including risks to safety and security; and a disengaged, unproductive citizen base. Writes Kitchin:

the smart city promises to solve a fundamental conundrum of cities – how to reduce costs and create economic growth and resilience at the same time as producing sustainability and improving services, participation and quality of life – and to do so in commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral and apolitical ways.

Once again, it’s a delicate balancing act with a range of countervailing interests and constituencies, as you can see in the chart from a related discussion above.

The perils of Smart Cities should never overwhelm their promise in my view, but urban pioneers should always have them in mind (from planning through implementation) because some perils only manifest themselves over time. According to Kitchin, the seven dangers in pursuing these initiatives include:

–taking “a ‘one size fits all’ approach, treating cities as generic markets and solutions [that are] straightforwardly scalable and movable”;

–assuming that initiatives are “objective and non-ideological, grounded in either science or commonsense.” You can aim for these ideals, but human and organizational preferences and biases will always be embedded within them.

–believing that the complex social problems in communities can be reduced to “neatly defined technical problems” that smart technology can also solve. The ways that citizens have always framed and resolved their community problems cannot be automated so easily. (This is also the thrust of Ben Green’s Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, which will be published by MIT Press in April. In it he argues for “smart enough alternatives” that are attainable with the help of technology but never reducible to technology solutions alone.)

–engaging with corporations that are using smart city technologies “to capture government functions as new market opportunities.” One risk of a company like Google to communities like Toronto’s is that Google might lock Toronto in to its proprietary technologies and vendors over a long period of time or use Toronto’s citizen data to gain business opportunities in other cities.

–becoming straddled with “buggy, brittle and hackable” systems that are ever more “complicated, interconnected and dependent on software” while becoming more resistant to manual fixes.

–becoming victimized by “pervasive dataveillance that erodes privacy” through practices like “algorithmic social sorting (whether people get a loan, a tenancy, a job, etc), dynamic pricing (whereby different people pay varying prices depending on their perceived customer value) and anticipatory governance using predictive profiling (wherein data precedes how a person is policed and governed).” Earlier this month, my post on popular on-line games like Fortnite highlighted the additional risk that invasive technologies can use the data they are gathering to change peoples’ behavior.

-and lastly, reinforcing existing power structures and inequalities instead of eroding or reconfiguring them.

While acknowledging the promise of Smart Cities at their best, Kitchin closes his article with this cautionary note:

the realities of implementation are messier and more complex than the marketing hype of corporations or city managers portray and there are a number of social, political, ethical and legal concerns with respect to the kind of society smart city initiatives seek to create. As such, whilst networked urbanism has benefits, it also poses challenges and risks that are often little explored or legislated for ahead of implementation. Indeed, the pace of development and rollout of smart city technologies is proceeding well ahead of wider reflection, critique and regulation.

Putting the cart before a suitably-designed horse is a problem with all new and seductive technologies that get embraced before their harms are identified or can be addressed—a quandary that was also considered here in a post called “Looking Out for the Human Side of Technology.”

2. The Value of Our Data

A few additional considerations about the Smart City are also worth bearing in mind as debate about these initiatives intensifies.

In a March 8, 2019 post, Kurtis McBride wrote about two different ways “to value” the data that these initiatives will produce, and his distinction is an important one. It’s a discussion that citizens, government officials and tech companies should be having, but unfortunately are not having as much as they need to.

When Smart City data is free to everyone, there is the risk that the multinationals generating it will merely use it to increase their power and profits in the growing market for Smart City technologies and services. From the residents’ perspective, McBride argues that it’s “reasonable for citizens to expect to see benefit” from their data, while noting that these same citizens will also be paying dearly for smart upgrades to their communities. His proposal on valuing citizen data depends on how it will be used by tech companies like Google or local service providers. For example, if citizen data is used:

to map the safest and fastest routes for cyclists across the city and offers that information free to all citizens, [the tech company] is providing citizen benefit and should be able to access the needed smart city data free of charge.

But, if a courier company uses real-time traffic data to optimize their routes, improving their productivity and profit margins – there is no broad citizen benefit. In those cases, I think it’s fair to ask those organizations to pay to access the needed city data, providing a revenue stream cities can then use to improve city services for all.

Applying McBride’s reasoning, an impartial body in a city like Toronto would need to decide whether Google has to pay for data generated in its Quayside community by consulting a benefit-to-citizens standard. Clearly, if Google wanted to use Quayside data in a Smart City initiative in say Colorado or California, it would need to pay Toronto for the use of its citizens’ information.

Of course, addressing the imbalance between those (like us) who provide the data and the tech companies that use it to increase their profits and influence is not just a problem for Smart City initiatives, and changing the “value proposition” around our data is surely part of the solution. In her new book Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff says that “you’re the product if these companies aren’t paying you for your data” does not state the case powerfully enough. She argues that the big tech platforms are like elephant poachers and our personal data like those elephants’ ivory tusks. “You are not the product,” she writes. “You are the abandoned carcass.”

Smart City initiatives also provide a way to think about “the value of our data” in the context of our living and working and not merely as the gateway to more convenient shopping, more addictive gaming experiences or “free” search engines like Googles’.

This post is adapted from my March 24, 2019 newsletter. Subscribe today and receive an email copy of future posts in your inbox each week.